TCS+ talk *this week*: Wednesday, March 5, Prasanna Ramakrishnan, Stanford University
Clement Canonne
This is a reminder that the next TCS+ talk is taking place this week, Wednesday, March 5th at 1:00 PM Eastern Time (10:00 AM Pacific Time, 19:00 Central European Time, 18:00 UTC). The speakers' slides will be made available at https://sites.google.com/view/tcsplus/welcome/past-talks after the talk.
If you’d like to join the Zoom talk, please sign up using the form at https://sites.google.com/view/tcsplus/welcome/next-tcs-talk. The talk will also be recorded and posted shortly afterwards on our YouTube channel, here: http://www.youtube.com/user/TCSplusSeminars.
Hoping to see you all there,
The organizers
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Speaker: Prasanna Ramakrishnan (Stanford University)
Title: How to Appease a Voter Majority
Abstract: In 1785, Condorcet established a frustrating property of elections and majority rule: it is possible that, no matter which candidate you pick as the winner, a majority of voters will prefer someone else. You might have the brilliant idea of picking a small set of winners instead of just one, but how do you avoid the nightmare scenario where a majority of the voters prefer some other candidate over all the ones you picked? How many candidates suffice to appease a majority of the voters? In this talk, we will explore this question. Along the way, we will roll some dice — both because the analysis involves randomness and because of a connection to the curious phenomenon of intransitive dice, that has delighted recreational and professional mathematicians alike ever since Martin Gardner popularized it in 1970.
Based on joint work with Moses Charikar, Alexandra Lassota, Adrian Vetta, and Kangning Wang.